Eyefinity
Possible Configurations Restrictions Crossfire Eyefinity on the HD5870 and HD5850 cards is currently incompatible with Crossfire. The HD5970 requires this capability in order to use both chips, so it's an imperfect indicator of how far the drivers have progressed. According to AMD it was easier to code for the HD5970 than for the others because there are a known number of lanes on which to use Crossfire. The HD5970 shipped with dual-GPU Eyefinity support for only 22 games, which are whitelisted as AMD tests them on a case-by-case basis. Other games are forced to using a single GPU of the two on the card. This is a much-desired feature. Part of the point of eyefinity was that specific games would not need to be coded for multi-monitor support. Using a wall of pixels takes a lot of power, and multi-GPU is one easy way to keep framerates up. List of games currently supported for dual-GPU Eyefinity operation on the HD5970 from this post on WSGF, original article(A launch review) now un-googleable: As an added bonus for Radeon 5970 users however, ATI is providing very limited Eyefinity support to the 5970 only. The 8.663.1 driver contains beta Eyefinity support for over a dozen different titles: Anno 1404 (aka Dawn of Discovery) Batman: Arkham Asylum BattleForge Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare Call of Duty 5 – World at War Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Crysis Crysis Warhead Dawn of War 2 (Warhammer 40K) Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Enemy Territory – Quake Wars Fallout 3 Far Cry 2 GhostBusters Left 4 Dead Need for Speed: Shift RaceDriver: GRID STALKER Clear Sky Tom Clancy’s HAWX Unreal Tournament 3 World of Warcraft (plus expansions) Now the Eyefinity support does come with a number of caveats. For starters, support is limited to the games listed above only. No other games are supported yet at this time. In addition, only landscape configurations scale properly. Running portrait mode will still function, but will rely on the primary GPU only. And again, Eyefinity support is limited to the 5970 card at this time. And from AMD product manager Dave Bauman: Crossfire X Eyefinity is a proof of concept on the 5970 drivers, partially as there is a more controlled environment between the two ASIC's (i.e. the PLX bridge) and it limited to a smaller set of profiled applications. We're doing some work to alter how this is achieved and we expect to have this opened up for the rest of the HD 5000 series in early 2010. Later in the thread, he says they will eventually change the 'whitelist' to a 'blacklist' of unsupported games, and indicates that he'd rather put a HD5970 sample through exhaustive review with WSGF after that point. FAQ: For questions not yet explained in the above sections *In what manners can you actually mix portrait and landscape? *Do devices like the Matrox TripleHead2Go interact well with Eyefinity? Is it possible to, for example, use two 1200x1920 monitors on the left through a TH2G and a DVI port, a 1200x1920 on the middle through Displayport, and another pair of 1200x1920 monitors on the right through another TH2G and the other DVI port? *How do games react to multiple display groups of dramatically different dimensions? *How does Eyefinity interact with SoftTH? What makes it different? Where is each better?